U.S. ballots are still counted by election officials in battlefield states.
Washington:
A judge said on Wednesday he wanted to make sure all remaining ballots for the hotly contested US election were delivered, demanding that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy answer questions about why the Postal Service failed. failed to perform a court-ordered sweep for the undelivered ballots.
“The pressing questions are where the ballots are and how to get them delivered so that they can be counted,” US District Judge Emmet Sullivan said as he concluded a hearing that included testimony from the US Postal Service official. (USPS) Kevin Bray, who answered questions about the delivery of ballots.
Many states will accept ballots up to a week after election day Tuesday provided they have been postmarked by then. Ballots are still counted by election officials in battlefield states during the contest between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
The Postal Service scans and uses priority mail networks until Saturday to deliver the remaining ballots. He said on Wednesday he completed the judge-ordered late Tuesday sweeps and presented just 13 ballots, all in Pennsylvania.
Sullivan had said that DeJoy, a person nominated by Trump and previously a Republican Party fundraiser, “is going to have to be impeached or appear before me and testify under oath as to why certain measures were not taken.”
Sullivan had ordered the sweeps in response to lawsuits brought by groups such as Vote Forward, the NAACP and advocates for the Latin American community.
The USPS told Sullivan he couldn’t meet his 3pm. EST (2000 GMT) deadline for Tuesday, saying it was not logistically possible.
“The court has made it clear that it expects full compliance,” Sullivan said. “I was equally shocked to learn that nothing else was done after the injunction was issued.”
Sullivan separately ordered a new round of sweeps at Texas postal processing centers ahead of Wednesday’s deadline for postal votes. The USPS said it had identified about 800 ballots for delivery in the state as of Wednesday in two sweeps.
Postal service data showed that as of Sunday, around 300,000 ballots received for processing mail had not received scans confirming their delivery to election authorities.
In a court filing the Postal Service said that “the lack of destination or finalization scanning does not mean the ballots were not delivered.”
The USPS said Wednesday that “the ballots were delivered before the election deadline. We used extraordinary measures to deliver the ballots directly to local election commissions. When this happens, by design, those ballots vote bypass some processing operations and do not receive a final result. analysis. “
Sullivan’s order covered processing centers in central Pennsylvania, northern New England, greater South Carolina, southern Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, and parts of Illinois, of Arizona, Alabama and Wyoming, as well as the cities of Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia and Detroit.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
